Okay, I have a couple of minor issues and I wanted to get your input on them.

Time difference, warp travel is SLOWER? It seems strange to me that time typically advances slower in the warp, so months may pass (Real Time) when you make a warp jump of a week. Doesn't that make it really tough to do things like answer distress calls? I am a long-time 40K player, and I'm sure it's come up before in the fluff (I don't read the novels, but I've read every edition of 40K since the first RT and supplements) and I honestly don't remember hearing about this. I know that, in the Eye of Terror and such, time advances very slowly or not at all sometimes (Chaos Space Marines: many were alive during the Horus Heresy) but it never occurred to me that warp travel was also like this. How does that work for you in game?

Also about time-sensitive missions, it can take a week of travel to get outside a solar system's Jump Point? Wow. And then another on the flip side. That means that ANY jump will take a minimum of about two weeks even if it's a tiny jump. That just seems, I don't know, weird to me. How fast do these ships move from one planet to another? One adjacent solar system to another without warp jumping?

How do you game the interval while the party is doing all this lumbering travel? Just tell them a week passes, and that's that? Ask them if there's anything special they'd like to do?

The system certainly makes sense and seems quite realistic to fluff, but it poses some GMing challenges and I'm just curious how you deal with them?

Jeff Tibbetts said:

One thing to note is that a lot of the numbers given for warp travel don't account for all the variables. A week-long journey through the Warp might take 12 weeks when viewed from realspace, but that's when crossing what the rulebook describes as "open warp" - areas with no charted routes or known favourable currents. In the most favourable situations, you may emerge after a week of warp travel to find that only two days have passed, or event that you've arrived shortly before you left.

Jeff Tibbetts said:

Compressed time for travel is a very common trope due to reletivity (not that that is the reason it happens here, but just saying, it isn't that strange). It doesn't cause quite as many problems as you think.

The main issue I think your having is that of perspective. You are looking at it from a star trek inspired prospective, where distress signals are recieved and answered in hours/days. 40k is much more inspired by Age of Sail sensebilities. You set off a distress signal in the hope that someone will hear it in months/years.

As for time sensitive missions...you don't have warp jump time sensitive missions that deal in any time periods less than months. Again, your think Star Trek instead of Age of Sail. Do you have a time sensetive mission to go from London to New York on a sailboat?

How fast to travel to adjacent solar systems without jumping? Well the closest star to our sun is 4.3 lightyears, and Imperial ships can't travel nearly that fast at sub-warp speeds. So, 20-40 years. In 40k if they don't have warp they go into cryo-sleep for decades/ceturies to travel without the warp.

The fluff is pretty consistant that it takes weeks/months/years to get anywhere, and weeks to get a message anywhere. As for what your characters do? They run the ship. They are the officers, this is their job. They do research and training. They also heal (remember, wounds in this game take weeks to heal).

Just remember, they aren't on the Millenium Falcon, or the Enterprise, they are on a ship from the Age of Sail. They are sailing off to the New World, to Africa, to India and China. When a distress signal is fount it is by a group of people who have been marooned on an island for months, or years. When something goes wrong and a war starts at the Embassy in China a message has to be sent back to England, forces have to be mobilized, and in six months, a year, or two years, troops ships will finally arrive.

Its just a different genre than popular science fiction.

That's very helpful as for the perspective, thanks very much for that. I'm not a fan of Star Trek, actually I've seen almost none of it, but I must admit that my concept of what happens on the bridge has been influenced by it, and perhaps as a general sci-fi standard I just assumed warp travel would be much faster. You bring up some very useful ways of looking at the sort of missions we'll be undertaking.

As for what the crew does en route, it just seems a little, I don't know, boring to say that three weeks have passed and that's that. Good point about the healing though!

Thanks much for the replies.

You are correct on the boring part. In fact, cruises like this are KNOWN for for being incredably, mind numbingly, insanity inducingly boring. Just use the time skip. Maybe even play it up every now and then, how boring it is.

BUT, when you are in warp...well i is anything but boring. One of the reasons the warp takes such a toll is because of the length of time spent there. Ok, it feels creepy, like something is watching you, hunting you, scraping at reality just out of the corner of your eye. That isn't so bad for an hour. But after weeks? Months? It drives men insane.

I dunno, I don't think it's boring. I think the time during voyages can be used for important character development and inter-party socialising and relationship development. That's what I do, anyway.

time is not so relative in the warp it goes forward it goes side ways it goes up and down but at its heart the warp is never a fun place to be even when your gellar fields are working properly so the warp time is essentially your choice as GM to decide how qick/slow it goes weather its a time to socialise/ develope characters of wheather the forces of the immaterium are trying to break down the gellar field and feast on the squishy sould inside